Translated "Avante!" article, by Pedro Guerreiro, Member of the CC and of the International Department

Despite the Council of Europe, which will take place on the 1/2nd March next, a resolution on the “ Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance within the Economic and Monetary Union”, will be signed - without any pomp and circumstance -, and which will have to be ratified by each of the signatory countries.

Once again, concealing this treaty’s unacceptable objectives and its intolerable consequences for the Country, it will bring upon the imposing unto workers and the Portuguese people, of the reinforcement of the EU great powers’ and their monopolies’ political and economic rule, placing Portugal under a submission to their dictates.

This treaty resolution, which, by its own nature, ought to be called an act of submission, demands the enrolment of the budget deficit limits and public debt, established under the Stability Pact in the Republic Constitution or in an equivalent bill, in case of default, the automatic imposition of “correction mechanisms” - in other words, settled measures by the “European Commission“ - and financial sanctions ( which can only be stopped by a “qualified majority” of states.

This authentic act of submission also aims at the imposition of entailing “structural reform programmes” ( labour laws, salaries, pensions, public services, social security, privatizations,… ), in the case of excessive debt, and the anticipated presentation, both to the Council and the Commission - that is, to the European Union -, of the national public debt emission plans.

This new treaty resolution represents the proceeding of the European capitalist integration process ( which the great powers and their monopolies have been hastily administrating since 1986), the “answer” to the crisis deepening, the sharpening of its insurmountable contradictions - inherent to capitalism.

The greater the political and economic power among the European Union’s supra-national institutions, dominated and at the service of the’ great powers and their monopolies’ interests, the greater the workers and the peoples’ conscience ,regarding this “integration‘s” class character and together with its policies, resistance and struggle towards their needs and longings satisfaction, their rights, their national sovereignty.

The greater the economic rule urgency, the workers’ and peoples ‘harder exploitation and spoliation, by the European Union’ great powers’ monopolist capital, the greater the need and eagerness for instruments which impose and ensure the political rule and the crushing of the peoples’ sovereignty and the states independence.

Being of capitalist nature, the “European integration” process - the European Union - is not reformable. As reality shows - Common Market, Economic and Monetary Union, treaty upon treaty, policy upon policy -, each stage within the European capitalist integration had and will have deep and serious consequences for the workers and peoples and represented and will represent greater impositions and external conditionings and increased dependence and submission of Portugal regarding the monopolist capitalism’s interests.
The country’s serious situation demands a rupture with the policy which is in its origin, that is, the right-wing policy carried out by the PS, PSD and CDS during the last 36 years.

The Country needs a patriotic and left-wing policy, a policy which ought to break through the right-wing policy carried out at national level, having external supports, namely with a more ostensible and more federalist, neo-liberal and militarist European Union.